'Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!'

Outwardly a compelling narrative of events aboard a British man-of-war during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, Billy Budd is a nautical recasting of the Fall, a parable of good and evil, a meditation on justice and political governance, and a searching portrait of three extraordinary men. The passion it has aroused in its readers over the years is a measure of how deeply it addresses some of the fundamental questions of experience that every age must reexamine for itself.

This edition draws on a new authoritative edition of Billy Budd, Sailor, which corrects the inaccuracies and excesses of former editions of Melville's notoriously incomplete final novella. Accompanied by extensive critical apparatus that draws on a wealth of recent Melville scholarship which highlights his contemporary relevance for questions of economics, ecology, identity, and sexuality and connects it to the key formal and interpretive issues at stake in understanding his art of fiction. It also includes a selection of Melville's short stories, as well as his review of Hawthorne's short fiction, 'Hawthorne and His Mosses'.

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